[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/functions.php on line 4668: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at [ROOT]/includes/functions.php:3815)[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/functions.php on line 4670: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at [ROOT]/includes/functions.php:3815)[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/functions.php on line 4671: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at [ROOT]/includes/functions.php:3815)[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/functions.php on line 4672: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at [ROOT]/includes/functions.php:3815)Horror World • View topic - Blood Ocean Preparedness Plan - 2 Weeks Left

If you have, then you are ready and you're already on your way to being a Pali Boy.

But if you're not, I don't want to leave you hanging. Wherever you live, I have a link for you. There isn't a corner of the globe where you can't buy Blood Ocean when it comes out in TWO WEEKS! In fact, it wouldn't hurt to pre-order it now.

I have links to brick and mortar and online stores in Estonia, Czech Republic, Romania, India, Belgium, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Japan, Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Ireland, France, Germany, England, United States, United Kingdom and many more. I have world wide links with free shipping. I have links to book clubs. I have links to your favorite store.

Note that I've left the links in the event you might want to cut and past this list or a portion of it and share it with your friends (hint hint).

Also, if you have a link I don't have or know of a place that's carrying it, please shoot me the information.

As on Pali Boy to another - Shaka Shaka!

Book Groups

Shelfari Link -

Library Thing Link –

Goodreads Link -

Brick and Mortar Bookstores (Note that all of these stores have online ordering options)

In a world reduced to ruin by all-consuming plague, one young boy embarks on a mission of revenge after one of his friends is found dead … harvested for his blood!

Kavika Kamalani is a Pali Boy on Nomi No Toshi, the floating city. The post-plague heir to an ancient Hawai’ian warrior tradition that believes in overcoming death by embracing one’s fears and living large, Kavika’s life is turned upside down when one of his friends dies – and he sets out to find the killer.

When he is kidnapped and subjected to a terrifying transformation, Kavika must embrace the ultimate fear – death itself. It is the only way if he, his loved ones, and the Pali Boys are to survive.

This stand-alone title is the latest pulse-pounding story of post-apocalyptic survival in The Afterblight Chronicles series from Weston Ochse – a writer who pulls no punches.

“Weston Ochse is an artist whose craft, stories and voice are so distinct and mesmerising that you can’t help but be enthralled.” – Dani Kollin, Prometheus Award-winning author of The Unincorporated Man

About the Series

The Afterblight Chronicles is a post-apocalyptic series in which a devastating epidemic has ravaged the world. In the Afterblight, pockets of humans attempt to continue civilization amidst the mounting chaos of the collapsed infrastructure . Mobs run rampant while cults and warlords fight for authority over the survivors of the global plague.

One of the three series with which Abaddon Books launched in 2006, The Afterblight Chronicles is a collection of stand-alone novels that has showcased the talents of a number of brilliant, up-and-coming authors, including Scott Andrews, Paul Kane, Jasper Bark and Rebecca Levene. Blood Ocean is the eleventh Afterblight Chronicles title.

About the Author

Weston Ochse is the Bram Stoker award-winning author of various short stories and novels, including the critically-acclaimed Scarecrow Gods and Tomes of the Dead novel, Empire of Salt

.

He is much in demand as a speaker at genre conventions and has been chosen as guest of honour on numerous occasions. Weston lives in Southern Arizona with his wife Yvonne and their menagerie of animals.

One of the major groups I populated the floating city with in my new post-apocalyptic novel Blood Ocean are the Pali Boys. When constructing the Pali Boys it wasn't hard to use both Peter Pan's Lost Boys and William Golding's Choir Boys from Lord of the Flies as a jumping off point. Both had groups of boys who threw caution to the wind and reveled in their own freedom. But this was just the beginning. To know the Pali Boys, you also have to know where the name derived and how their culture dictates their actions.

Pali Pass is rich in history. It 'was here where King Kamehameha I fought his last battle in his war to unite all the Hawaiian Islands with an army of 10,000 soldiers. In 1795, a few hundred warriors were driven off the cliff to their death 1,000 feet below by Kamehameha’s men. Legend has it that on certain nights, one can still hear the screams of the warriors. According to reports, workers unearthed 80 skulls believed to have belonged to the warriors during a road construction in 1848.(Cite)'

A Hawaiian friend of mine, Kimo Kalanui, once told me a story about how the trade winds were so fierce that many a young wanna-be Hawaiian warrior would leap out from Pali Pass into the tradewinds, leaving their fate to Pele. Having stood at the edge of the pass, it was a place I could lean at a forty-five degree angle and not fall over; and that was on a normal day, so it was easy to imagine how on a windy day someone could jump out and be hurled back by the strength of the winds.

So I took the idea of the young warriors leaping out and turned it into a rite of passage aboard the floating city; a rite of passage for my Pali Boys.

Blood Ocean takes place sometime between 20 and 100 years into the future. It really doesn't matter, because everything has gone to shit. Here's the premise of the novel:

Survivors of the Cull, a Plague that wiped out people without the blood type O-neg, struggle in the floating Sargasso City jigsawed together with ships, submarines, barges and oil tankers off the coast of what was once known as California.

Separated by demarcations of turf, ethnicity and fear, it’s not so much living as existing. High above it all swing the Pali Boys: descendants of Hawaiian warriors, they desire to lift themselves and the spirits of the residents below by performing an increasingly impossible series of extreme stunts, designed to test their manhood, and demonstrate the vibrancy humanity once had.

But as a conspiracy of murder unfolds and blood attacks increase, Kavika a single under-sized Pali Boy must strive to overcome his lowly status and the condemnation of his peers in order to save them all from an enemy living within.

The floating city is filled with many groups. These groups are separated first by ethnicity, then by social strata. There are groups of transsexuals, drug dealers, scavengers-- The Boxers, He-Shes, Water Dogs, etc (More on those in the next primer.) Then there are regular folk. Because the O Neg plague spared more Asians than Caucasians, the ship is populated with many of the ethnicities found along the Pacific Rim.

The Pali Boys comprise the male youth of Hawaiian contingent. To become a full-time Pali Boy one must be without fear and leap into the face of a typhoon to allow the goddess Pele to hurl you back. They raise hell with pretty much everyone, flying through the rigging like wanna-be Tarzans, playing games of follow the leader all across the length and breadth of the city. They deliver messages, steal fish, perform petty crimes, and do good deeds. They work on their stick fighting and Kuai Lua martial arts. They seem to be out of control... BUT!

There is a method to the Pali Madness. How do you keep a host of young men ready to be warriors at the end of the world when there's really no one to fight? How do you keep them from getting board? How do you keep their skills sharp and ready as a honed blade in the event they are needed?

Yep. You know the answer. The Pali Boys.

And they will be needed.

Stay tuned for the next Primer where I will talk about all the other groups. Then the last primer, to be published later next week will talk about the process of writing the novel.

And remember. Blood Ocean premiers 14 February in the U.S. and 16 February everywhere else.

As promised, here is your second primer for Blood Ocean. If you haven't read the first one, which discusses the Pali Boys, you can find it here.

Why set this in the Pacific Ocean? Why not the Atlantic or Mediterranean? The answer to that lies with the plague. The very nature of the plague is that only people with O Neg blood survive. It just so happens that more Asians have Oneg blood than most other races, so it seemed a good choice to place the setting aboard a floating city in the Pacific Ocean. Also, since I've traveled extensively throughout Asia, I could write about many of the peoples and their microcosmic cultures with a sense of understanding.

Here's what I used in my initial pitch:

SETTING: Nami No Toshi. Definition. City on the Waves (Japanese). Created by survivors of the Oneg plague off the coast of California. At the core of NNT is the Freedom Ship. Initially idealized by American President Richard Nixon, this ten story floating city, four times the size of the Queen Mary, was created by the Mitsubishi Corporation to support natural disasters. NNT was quickly overrun by those attempting to escape the violence and the gangs operating in the aftermath of the plague. Little is left to identify it as it once was. Now, more than a thousand ships, submarines and barges have been attached to NNT. The original ship is governed like a Japanese corporation (called Corpers), but all other areas and places aboard the other vessels have set their own governments and ways to survive. Other places are usually aligned by economics, and or ethnicity. They include, but are not limited to:

* Corpers – The remnants of the Mitsubishi Corporation who live in the Freedom Ship. They have a dirigible that can travel from the city to shore. They also have computers and other sophisticated machinery, powered by nuclear reactor. * Saru No Kyuden (Japanese) – Monkey House (run by the Corpers). * Boxers (Chinese) – Fists of Righteous Harmony, or Boxers (from the Rebellion of 1898). * Taeyang-ui Sallam (Korean) – People of the Sun. * Sky Winkers – Satellite Worshippers. Scientists from all walks of life who are actually recording information blinked from a pair of satellites. * Water Dogs - Those who choose to live beneath the city. They control the water, and everything outside the Corpers fish bins. If you fall in, you are ransomed. If your family can’t pay, you are bait for the bigger fish. They trade in trash, fuel, and anything of value. If it floats or sinks, they eventually get it. * Mga Taos (Filipino) – The People are monkey worshipers. Most of the time they just follow monkey-backs around. * He-Shes - Multi-ethnic group of cross-dressers * Vitamin-Vs -The crew of a disabled Russian sub who spend their days distilling vodka * Los Tiburones (Spanish) – The Sharks. The drug dealers of the city. * The Real People – Multi-ethnic (non-Asian) group of North Americans. * Pali Boys (Hawaiian) - Young men who live on the edge, and do the most dangerous things as homage to their warrior ancestors and King Kamehameha’s defeat of the enemy armies at Pali Point, Hawaii.

One of the things I love about books like these are the various and myriad characters. Anyone who has read Velvet Dogma will know this, especially with the Day Eaters and the Ack Acks. Maybe it comes from Watching and loving Warriors as a kid. Or maybe it's all the other books I grew up reading, such as Robert Adams' Horseclans books or any of the Conan books (Yes, I said Conan), or any number of Fantasy books filled with interesting groups and characters. These sorts of creations provide depth to the world building.

I have links to brick and mortar and online stores in Estonia, Czech Republic, Romania, India, Belgium, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Japan, Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Ireland, France, Germany, England, United States, United Kingdom and many more. I have world wide links with free shipping. I have links to book clubs. I have links to your favorite store.

Note that I've left the links in the event you might want to cut and past this list or a portion of it and share it with your friends (hint hint).

Also, if you have a link I don't have or know of a place that's carrying it, please shoot me the information.

As promised, here is your third and final primer for Blood Ocean. If you haven't read the first one, which discusses the Pali Boys, you can find it here. And if you haven't read the second one, which discusses character and setting, you can find that here.

So why did I write this? I mean besides the fact that I'm getting paid a fine sum of English pounds with worldwide distribution of a beautiful-looking paperback book. I can't include that in my reasons, because I never knew any of that when I first pitched Abaddon when they first started out way back when.

I don't know where I was at the time, but I do remember that I heard about a new publishing house called Abaddon Books and asked for their bible about Afterblight. I sent a quick pitch, and I mean quick, and I got back an email from Jon Oliver, then Editor-in-Chief of Abaddon, now Editor-in-Chief of both Abaddon and Solaris, that he was intrigued about the idea and would I send him a full pitch, which has a sample chapter as well as a chapter by chapter outline. So I found myself working on this for about a month. In fact, I finished the pitch while I was in a hotel room in Alexandria, Virginia, working on my laptop while the Steelers beat the Colts in the Superbowl.

My pitch at that time was about Native Americans in the Southwest, who must team up with an L.A. gang of biker samurai to fight off the Radiant Dawn - the white folks who want their blood. It was a damn good pitch. I sooo wanted to write that book. But the problem was that every Tom, Dick and English Harry submitted a pitch about Native Americans too.

Needless to say they didn't need me.

So I did what every other writer would do in my shoes... I sulked and wrote something else.

Then about a year later, I was at the Book Expo of American in Los Angeles. My agent and I went around and had some table-side chats with a few of the editors, one being Jon. This was our first face to face. Being an outgoing person - those of you who know me will agree with this - I enjoy face to face conversations. I thrive on them. Jon and I got to talking. He mentioned that he liked my pitch and was sorry to have to pass on it, but why not send him a pitch for a zombie novel.

A zombie novel? It had never occurred to me to write a zombie novel.

But I did. I sent him a pitch and it became Empire of Salt which sold out everywhere and was a smash hit! (still available as a used book and on kindle)

But I still wanted to to write an Afterblight novel. There'd been a burning inside of me that had not gone away. So even as Empire of Salt was premiering in Brighton, England at the World Horror Convention, I was verbally pitching Jon a sprinkle of an idea. He told me to put it on paper when I returned to America and send it to him. I think he saw how eager I was, plus, I think I was keeping him from the pub. So whether or not he meant it or not, I took that as a YES, mentally pumped one arm, and began to work on an idea which revolved around an idea of a monkey being surgically attached to a person's back.

And when I returned to America, I wrote the pitch. Took me about a month as everything came together. And to be totally honest, at first he wasn't sure and didn't accept it right away. But like a dog with a dead rabbit, I shook that idea and shook it, and tweaked the pitch until finally he liked it enough to say those magical five magic words - I'll send you a contract.

And in a few days everyone can read Blood Ocean.

I'm extremely excited about this book. There's some violence. I've done some horrendous things to some nice people and made a nice race do something terrible. As I was writing this, I tried not to pull any punches. I wanted this to be as graphic a novel as anything I've ever written, but with my usual characterization. A few reviewers have socked me for doing some of these things, but I didn't write this for them. I wrote this for me. And I wrote this for you. And I wrote this for all of you who grew up on Post-Apocalyptic novels and movies. Fans of The Horseclans and Road Warrior will dig the hell out of this, because they know that when society crumbles, so do the niceties. Our behavior is traded in for survival and we'll do whatever it takes to do that, whether it is to kill, maim, lie, cheat, or eat our neighbor.